Aurora theater shooting victims ponder chance's role in their survival

Victims and relatives of those killed and wounded in the July 20 theater shooting leave the courtroom at the Arapahoe County Courthouse on Friday, Jan. 11th. The arraignment for James Holmes that had been scheduled for Friday was postponed until March 12. (Photos by RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)

CENTENNIAL — As the sun rose outside on the morning of July 20, detectives walked back and forth across the movie theater's bloody carpet and counted the bullets.

They found 76 used casings — fired from three guns. They found 224 live rounds. Outside, they found unused magazines that fell from the suspect's pockets as he was being searched.

And in a hallway leading to the theater lobby, they found the reason why, perhaps, the shooter fired fewer than a quarter of the bullets he had: a jammed 100-round rifle magazine.

"Had Holmes' high-capacity magazine not jammed, I don't even know that I'd be alive," said Stephen Barton, who was in the crowded theater where James Holmes allegedly opened fire and killed 12 people. "And I think a lot of other people would be dead too."

Long-withheld details of the attack at the Century Aurora 16 theater that came pouring out at Holmes' preliminary hearing last week underscored just how random the tragedy was — life or death decided by little more than time and place.

In the wake of the shooting, survivors considered what role their chance decisions that night played in their fates and the fates of those who died.

Out of about 375 moviegoers, fatal bullets felled 12. Fifty-eight others — including three in the theater next door — were wounded by gunfire, and another dozen were injured fleeing the mass shooting.

What if the gunman hadn't ignored the theater number on his ticket and ducked into Theater 9?

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What if two Aurora police shifts hadn't overlapped in the midnight hour, allowing 129 officers to respond within 5 minutes of 911 calls and help ferry the wounded to medical care?

What if the victims had chosen seats a little to the left, or a little to the right, or run a bit late and missed the show altogether?

For as much as prosecutors and police say Holmes planned his attack, it was the unforeseeable — the chance turns, a jammed gun, the last-minute decisions — that determined who lived or died.

The chances that Barton, 22, would be in Theater 9 at all — let alone in the early minutes of July 20 for a Batman premiere — were breathtakingly slim.

Had he and his friend pedaled a little faster — or a little slower — on the bikes they were riding from the East Coast to San Francisco, they might not have landed in Aurora. But the pair paused on their trek to stay with Petra Anderson, a friend of Barton's bike mate's.

None of them was a big Batman fan, but a night at the movies sounded fun.

The three sat toward the back of Theater 9 and suffered wounds from shotgun pellets. Barton blocked the worst of the barrage when he threw up his arms to cover his head.

"For all I know, that saved my life," he said. "My right arm took four or five gunshot pellets that were headed for my face and neck."

Call it chance, or a miracle, but the bit of metal that entered near Anderson's nose traveled through a thin channel in her brain without tearing through the center.

A millimeter to either side, and the pellet would have caused catastrophic damage to areas governing speech and movement.

Barton said Anderson expects to make a full recovery.

"The what-ifs"

Jansen Young — so slight in frame and voice that police initially mistook the 21-year-old for a teenager — has thought a lot about the randomness of that night and how things might have come out differently.

Like dozens of victims and victims' families, Young last week sat through three days of painstakingly laid-out detail showing what happened in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the massacre.

"On the way to the theater, we talked about how tired we both were, how maybe we shouldn't go that night," said Young. "What if we hadn't? What if we would have gotten a flat tire? You can kill yourself with the what-ifs."

Chance isn't what saved her inside the theater, though. At least, not entirely.

She and boyfriend Jonathan Blunk, 26, found seats in what turned out to be the most lethal section of the theater, rows 8 through 12, where authorities believe a tear-gas canister landed.

At least six of the slain victims were found in that area, according to testimony from Aurora Detective Matthew Ingui.

Blunk died shielding Young from bullets. With tear gas choking the air, Blunk unresponsive and no sign of their cellphones, Young said her first thought was to find a way to call 911 for help.

She started toward the lobby at first but worried there may be a second shooter waiting to pick off fleeing patrons.

Instead, she raced out the emergency exit and spotted Holmes in helmet and body armor standing beside the white two-door he drove to the theater. He happened to be looking inside the car instead of at Young, giving her the chance to quietly creep into a hiding spot in a garbage-bin enclosure.

Aurora police Officer Jason Oviatt testified that just before he took Holmes into custody, the alleged gunman's hands had been resting on the roof of his car near a Glock handgun with a green laser sight.

"The fact that I ran into the shooter a second time, that was luck," Young said. "He had his gun, he had the ammunition and he had that green laser on it. Had I run past him, he could have put that green dot on my head, and I would have been done for. I came face to face with death twice that night."

Likewise, 18-year-old Alejandra Cardona — the only one injured of a dozen or so friends who arrived together — considers how she may have inadvertently saved the life of one of her companions as they crammed themselves beneath the seats in the middle of the theater around Row 16.

Micayla Medek, 23, died in that row. Cardona took a shotgun blast to the right thigh that came through the seat in front of her.

"I think about that all the time, too," Cardona said. "When we were crawled up under the seats, my legs were around their face. I always think about what if?"

Cardona still wonders how her boyfriend was able to carry her out another emergency exit at the top of the stairs and out into the parking lot, where the first cop they ran into happened to be a school resource officer she recognized from her days at Gateway High School.

Deadly ticket

Investigators also revealed that Holmes purchased a ticket for Theater 8, but ducked into Theater 9 instead. Several moviegoers, unaware of what was to come, either switched or considered switching theaters before the movie started that night.

One of the first people out of the theater — 19-year-old Jordan Crofter — had sneaked into Theater 9 to sit with friends.

Buddies of 29-year-old Jesse Childress, who died in Row 8, wanted him to join them in Theater 8, but he declined. Childress ultimately died while trying to protect an unnamed female friend who made it out alive.

Likewise, the gunman's targets seem random. Some victims describe him methodically picking out people. Others say he sprayed the crowd with bullets.

Prosecutors describe his method as "indiscriminate," one of the components important to building the first-degree murder charges filed against him.

"All of his actions indicate he not only intended to kill everybody in that theater but he didn't care who he killed," prosecutor Karen Pearson said Wednesday in summing up her side's case.

Corbin Dates and Jennifer Seeger sat in the second row and saw someone walk out the back exit on a phone call. When the gunman returned, he moved through the crowd and stopped in front of Seeger.

Silently, he pointed a long rifle at her face. Then he shot at the person sitting behind her.

Immediately after the attack, Seeger had no explanation for why she was spared: "I have no idea why he didn't shoot me."

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